Diaries of Mary Drew
Mary Gladstone (Mrs. Drew) : Her Diaries and Letters. Edited by Lucy Masterman. (Methuen. 21s.) MARY GLADSTONE was the fifth of Mr. Gladstone's eight children. Her mother was one of the two beautiful Miss Glynnes who were married upon the same day, one to Mr. Gladstone and one to Lord Lyttelton. Lady Lyttelton had an even larger family than her sister, and Mary was brought up in a circle of nineteen contemporaries. This huge family party, always in and out of one another's houses, certainly made for happiness, though both Lytteltons and Gladstones seem to have suffered a good deal at the hands and tongues of private schoolmasters and governesses. Mary herself has left it on record that the woman who directed her education from when she was ten to when she was seventeen always appeared to think her half-witted, and never front first to last gave her one word of encouragement. Both Mrs. Gladstone and Lady Lyttelton were kind and affectionate if in some respects easy-going mothers, and the children, in spite of schoolroom hardships, grew up in a happy atmosphere " brimful of family affection and mental activity."
The best part of this delightful book is a record of table talk. The cousinhood found in conversation an unending and ever more exciting game. Like golf, it brought all ages together, and though they quoted with laughter the witty saying that while " young men see visions and old men dream dreams," the middle-aged " only chew," they admitted their elders to their most intimate friendship. Indeed, Mary declared as a girl that most of her best friends were about fifty. Conversation in those days was daring even where young women were concerned, though not in the modern sense. Here is a specimen of what we mean. Mary Gladstone meets a middle-aged friend
0, Mr. Cowper, why have you begun again ? You'll die diming out ! " But that'sjust why I have begun again', he said,
to escape the thought of death, to let me die living, not to live dying.' I was startled by a kind of desperate earnestness in his tone. As we sat down at the table, he continued—' Do you see —'s white hair ? It is the haunting fear of death that has bleached her hair. Look at —. Do you know why he gambles ? To escape the thought of death. It is the one fact in our lives that is absolutely certain, yet we dare not contemplate it. We do all we possibly can to run away from it.' And he took each person round, the table and showed me the unmistakable signs, as he thought, of flight from the terrible, haunting thought of death."
Being who they were, all the conspicuous people of their generation were within their parents' reach. They all dined or breakfasted with the Gladstones or their cousins in a long and brilliant succession, and apparently all talked in character. Of politicians there were, of course, no end—one after another ministers dropped in to meals " continuing the Cabinet while eating." Impressions of them all find a place in the diaries. Only the greater enemies remain in the shadow. We long to see Disraeli in a better light, but Mr. Gladstone disliked him to the end. True he proposed a national memorial to his rival immediately after his death, somewhat to the scandal of his daughter :—
" Father said Lcird Beaconsfield had lowered the whole standard of morality in polities specially among Conservatives and in a lesser degree among Liberals. I asked why then he proposed a national memorial of him ? ' The Prime Minister's reply was like himself. Parliament and the nation,' he said, had backed him up, they were responsible for him, a statue should be given to a man according to the place he occupied in public estimation.' "
It is not, however, the politicians who hold our attention most firmly in this entertaining bit of social history. It is the men of letters, the painters and poets, clergy and philosophers who crowded to Carlton House Terrace, Hawarden, or Harley Street Tennyson growled his rough speeches and his discon- certing compliments at breakfast, and read his own poetry in a sonorous voice afterwards. Browning disappointed his company again and again. He had become stale through long practice of the social game, had, as someone said, " dinnered himself away," We see Lord Acton, that giant among thinkers who set so little down, " almost drunk with delight " at finding
himself next to George Eliot. That such a man as he should have compared her to Shakespeare and in some particulars to his disadvantage makes one wonder if the modern verdict upon her work can be final. She seemed to her youthful critic
to be " repulsively ugly." Afterwards, however, she saw the " great face " with other eyes reminiscent as it certainly was of Dante and Savonarola. There is ugliness and ugliness, however. Bishop Lightfoot's rugged countenance charmed his friends " delightful, ugly, squinting, toad," as Mary Gladstone called him. Ruskin fills his hosts with admiration when he comes to stay, bursting into art criticism as desired and calling Rubens " a magnificent beast of a painter." Huxley is another favoured intellectual, whose unorthodoxy does not distress her so much as that of far less dangerous heretics. She hears that he has said that for a short scientific description of the creation he would quote Genesis.
The more conspicuous journalists, Delane in the early days, later on R. H. Hutton, Harry Quitter, Canon McColl, all appear, from time to time, to entertain us. In this connexion we cannot refrain from quoting a new story about Lord Kitchener, though it belongs to a much later date when Mary Gladstone had ceased to be her father's secretary, had married a clergyman and indeed become a widow. " Who may this Hardy be ? " asked Lord Kitchener, dining at Lord London- derry's and bored by enthusiastic talk about the veteran novelist. "A man to whom His Majesty gave the Order of Merit as he did to your Lordship," replied Edmund Gosse.
But enough of old photographs. Mary Gladstone has some antediluvian sketches to show us of London indoors and out, in the days when professional people lived around the hearth and before the scenery of the streets was submerged in the great flood of traffic. Here are two little pictures taken at random :— " April, 1881.
" Went a sort of midnight expedition with Alfred to North End Road arriving there at 7 and a most pleasant hour of quiet bright talk in the dark room by the flickering fire round Burnt) Jones's sofa, wife and children sitting about listening, a picture of perfect domestic peace and brightness which was most moving to me.' "
The second is an outdoor piece :-
"London—March, 1884. Parents off at 3 to Coombe, a queer procession, dog-cart ahead to show the way, shut family coach and yellow hansom with detective bringing up the rear ' and so through the spacious streets they trotted along."
Numerous illustrations add to the book's interest.
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